An Eclectic Journal of Opinion, History, Poetry and General Bloviating

Saturday, January 17, 2015

Lucy Parsons and the March of the Unemployed Terrified Chicago Plutocrats

Lucy Parsons after her husband's execution.

There
were hard times in Chicago a hundred
years ago today.Hell there were hard
times across the country.The nation had
never really recovered from the Panic of
1910, then plunged again into a sharp recession that had been dragging on
since 1913.Business activity had fallen
off a staggering 25%.Unemployment was
not yet measured accurately, but was staggering especially in the great industrial cities like Chicago.Hardest hit were the armies of casual laborers who in the best of
times floated from temporary work to temporary work, the mass of unskilled and semi-skilled industrial workers, immigrants, and the flood of displaced farm and small town workers who
flooded the city looking for non-existent work.On top of the winter of
1914-15 was one of the harshest since the turn
of the century. Tens of thousands of the ragged homeless roamed the streets, their bodies found frozen in the
soot-grimed snow.Some found refuge in train stations and even police precincts and fire houses on the most brutal
nights.Soup kitchen could not keep up with demand.In addition to the bums and hobos the city
was accustomed to seeing even in good times, there were more and more women and children among the homeless as wave after wave of evictions hit the slum districts.Newspapers wrung
their hands—not so much at the plight of the poor, but at the impositions their suffering placed on
respectable citizens.Something had to
be done and one woman, Lucy Parsons knew
damn well what to do.

Parsons
was one formidable woman with decades of working
class struggle behind her and a reputation that literally terrified the powers that be.Just a few years later the Chicago Police would report that the
then septuagenarian was “more
dangerous than a thousand rioters.”

Her
exact origins were obscure and made intentionally murkier by her own efforts.Lucia
Eldine Gonzalez—the birth name
she claimed--was born somewhere in Texas
around 1853, almost surely in slavery.She was apparently of mixed ethnic and racial
origins.Surely she was part Black and lived among Blacks.In the immediate post-Civil War Era she was married to or lived with an ex-slave named Oliver Gathings.

Around
1870 she met Albert Parsons, a
dashing former Confederate soldier who
had become a passionate Reconstruction
Republican.He edited Republican
newspapers in Texas, supported full suffrage
for Freedmen, and railed against night riders like the emerging Ku Klux Klan.He was under constant threat to his life, had
been beaten, kidnapped, and shot in
the leg in various incidents.Lovely young Lucy became Parson’s fearless
ally and then lover.She abandoned
Gathings to be with him and their relationship only fueled anti-miscegenation rage.

In
1872 the couple fled for their lives and settled in Chicago in 1873 where
Parsons eventually found work as a typographer
for the Chicago News.Lucy
worked as a seamstress and dressmaker.They lived as man and wife although
no marriage documents have ever been
found.Due to bitter social ostracism and criminal liability she denied Black blood and explained her brown
skinas the result of Mexican and Indian—Creek—heritage in addition to White ancestry.This apparently fooled few people, either
Black or White.She was regularly
denounced as a Mulatto in her
lifetime.

Both
of the Parsons rapidly rose to leadership in Chicago’s working class movements.Albert
was active in his craft union and
the Central Labor Council.Becoming increasingly radicalized both
joined the infant Socialist Labor Party
(SLP) in 1876.He would run for City Council under it banner.

When
the Great Railway Strike of 1877
swept into the city, Albert emerged as an important leader and spoke to crowds
of 25,000 or more.While not giving up
previous affiliations, both joined the International
Working People’s Association—the so-called Anarchist First International and became its most influential English language leaders in a movement
dominated in the city by Germans.

Albert was black balled from work at his trade
eventually becoming editor of the English anarchist paper Alarm!Lucy opened a dressmaking shop to support her
husband and a young son but also became a leader in efforts to organize the needle trades and other women dominated occupations.

In
1886 the IWPA became the principle organizer in Chicago of the May 1st national Eight Hour Day Strike.As
many as 350,000 workers walked off their jobs in the first three days of May
making Chicago the effective epicenter of the national movement.There were also coincidently major on-going
strikes, including one by thousands of workers at the McCormack.Albert was one of
the speakers to a rally of strikers there on May 3 when police opened fire on
the crowd killing four workers and wounding scores.At the same time Lucy was leading women
garment workers on strike.

Both
helped publicize and promote a protest rally at the Haymarket on the rainy evening of May 4, but neither were able to
be at the event.None the less when a bomb went off amid charging police Albert was among the anarchists
sought by police.Alerted to the danger,
Albert managed to escape to Wisconsin where
he hid out for several days.Lucy was
arrested and closely questioned, but released.Eventually Albert returned to the city to turn himself in to stand trial
with six other anarchists for the riot.

Lucy
visited Albert in jail daily where she took dictation of his memoirs and
gathered profiles of all of the other defendants. These she published in pamphlets
as part of her relentless campaign to support the accused.She raised money for the defense, spoke at
numerous rallies and meeting, and wrote articles and letters that made the
trial an international cause celeb.

Parsons
and her children went to visit her husband one last time at but she was
arrested, stripped naked, and thrown into a cell at Cook County Jail on November
11, 1887 as Albert was lead to the gallows singing her favorite ballade Annie
Laurie in his clear tenor voice.When it was over she was allowed to go
home.But she first vowed to the press
to continue the fight.

Lucy
lost her dress shop and was reduced to stark poverty after Albert’s death.Supporters formed the Pioneer Aid and Support Society which raised money for the Monument at the Haymarket Martyr’s grave site at German Waldheim Cemetery and also proved Parsons with a meager $8 a
month subsistence stipend.

Parsons
continued to work to preserve the memory of her husband and his co-defendants
and to advance the causes of anarchism and a militant labor movement.She sold the pamphlet biographies and later a
handsomely mounted book, The Autobiography of Lucy Parsons
which consolidated them all with steel
engravings into one volume to support herself and her work.She also made speeches and attempted to
lecture.But the relentless Chicago
Police broke up her meetings and threatened hall owners who might rent to her
for her lectures and repeatedly arrested her when she tried to sell her
pamphlets and books on the street.

The
harassment just made Parson’s more determined and made her a leading voice for free speech as well as for worker’s
rights.In 1893 the courts finally ruled
that even anarchists had free speech rights although police harassment of her
continued.

Despite
these travails, Parsons grew in stature world-wide.In 1888 she was invited to London to address the Socialist League of England on a program in which she shared the dais with the Russian anarchist Prince
Peter Kropotkin.During the same
trip she was invited to become a contributor the leading French radical periodical, Les Temps Nouveaux.

The
same year back in Chicago she became a harsh critic of labor leaders who threw
their lot in with the Democratic Party
in hopes of moderate reforms and “practical” concessions.Parsons believed that such half-measures not
only cheated the working class, but delayed the systematic revolution that would abolish capitalism
once and for all.

Previously
a trade unionist parsons looked at
the open class warfare engendered by
disputes like the Homestead Steel Strike
in Pennsylvania and in the silver mines of Coeur D’Alene, Idaho and
concluded that they were harbingers of successful social revolution and that industrial
unionism was the strongest organizational tool of the working class.Parsons expounded these views in Freedom:
A Revolutionary Anarchist-Communist Monthly which she founded and
co-edited.She found her views confirmed
in the Pullman Strike of 1894.

Her
recognized leadership among American anarchists was challenged by a younger
rival, Emma Goldman, after Goldman
emerged from prison for her part in her lover Alexander Berkman’s attempted assassination of steel baron Andrew Carnegie’s partner and right-hand man Henry Clay Frick.Goldman took to the lecture platform and
often spoke to middle-class and upper-class liberal audiences for money,
which Parsons considered a betrayal.Worse, Goldman strayed from single minded attention to the class
struggle to embrace many issues of personal freedom including free love.Although Parsons was resolutely feminist
in advocating for the complete emancipation of women and their equality
with men in work and social arrangements, she felt that free love was both a bourgeois indulgenceand a threat to the family as the bulwark of strength for
workers of both sexes.The two bitterly
sniped at each other in their writings and occasionally in public
confrontations for years.

In
1905 Parsons was in attendance at the Continental
Congress of the Working Class which united socialists, anarchists, syndicalists and trade unionists in a
new militant organization that almost perfectly mirrored Parsons’s views—the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).She took out the second Red Card issued
to a woman and joined the likes of radical industrial unionists William D. “Big Bill” Haywood of the Western Federation of Miners and William Trautman of the Brewery Workers, Daniel De Leon of the SLP
(much changed since her early membership of that organization years before),
and Eugene V. Debs former leader of
the American Railway Union and
founder of the Socialist Party (SP.)

Although
first De Leon in a 1906 huff and much more quietly Debs some years later
departed the IWW for its refusal to engage in electoral political action, that was just fine with Parsons who had
no faith in either reformism or politics.Although she never was employed by the union, she voluntarily worked for
it and promoted its goals in public appearances and in a new periodical, The
Liberator supported by and supporting of the union which made women’s
equality issues a major focus.

During
and after the string of panics and recessions that began in 1907, Parsons
became particularly interested in the plight of the unemployed.In San
Francisco Parsons and IWW members assumed leadership of the Unemployment Committee which began
staging mass meetings and marches to demand public works projects to put people to work.When police threatened Parsons famously led
one parade with hundreds of women.Almost two years of agitation the unemployed of the city gained some
concessions from the city.

Parsons
had always been leery of reformist demands like public works programs, but came
to see how the mass struggle for them emboldened the working class, gave it
experience in self-organization, and
could be a pathway to ultimate revolution.

Parson's Chicago P.D. mug shot after her arrest at the 1915 hunger march.

Back
in Chicago during the cruel winter of 1914, Parsons had a model and the
experience to stage a similar campaign.Just
the announcement of the march set the city nabobs on edge.After all, Parson’s had never minced her
words.After all, the mighty Chicago
Tribune quoted her as saying during the terrible depression of 1882-75
as recommending:

Let every dirty,
lousy tramp arm himself with a revolver or a knife, and lay in wait on the
steps of the palaces of the rich and stab or shoot the owners as they come out.
Let us kill them without mercy, and let it be a war of extermination.

As
handbills advertising the planned
march spread around the poorest precincts of the city and announcements were
printed in the active and multi-lingual radical
press stirred up excitement the editor of the IWW’s publication Solidarity Ralph Chaplin was moved
to finish an anthem for the
march.He already had some verses that
he had penned while working with Mother
Jones during the bitter 1912-’13 Kanawha
County, West Virginia coal miner’s
strike.He polished them up and
added a new, particularly incendiary verse:

Is there aught we hold in common with the
greedy parasite,

Who would lash us into serfdom and would
crush us with his might?

Is there anything left to us but to
organize and fight?

He
set it to music and rushed copied to the printer to be sung by the
marchers.Solidarity Forever became
not only the theme song for the IWW, but the great anthem of the whole labor
movement, although more conservative unions would expunge that verse and modify
other when they used it.

As
many as 15,000 of the unemployed and their labor movement supporters marched
behind Lucy Parsons on January 17, 1915 demanding immediate relief.Parsons, naturally, was arrested.

The
impressive success of that march encouraged more moderate members of the labor
movement to act.The IWW’s bitter
conservative craft union rival the AFL,
the Socialist Party, and Jane Adams Hull
House organized a second massive demonstration on February 12. It was a
one-two punch, the labor equivalent of bad cop/good cop.The interventions of the relative moderates
gave city officials an opening to announce immediate plans to decentralize
emergency relief including soup kitchens and shelters as well a beginning
projects to hire the unemployed for everything from hand shoveling snow from
city streets and pot hole repair to
building sidewalks and paving previously muddy side streets.None of which would have happened if Lucy
Parsons hadn’t scared the crap out of them first.

Within
three years Ralph Chaplin would be one of the 101 IWW leaders tried in Chicago
for war-time subversion under the Espionage
Act.Like all of the rest, and 64
others tried at Leavenworth, Kansas he
was sentenced to prison and served four years of a twenty year sentence.

Parson’s
rival Emma Goldman was one of the aliens
rounded up in the post-war Red Scare
and was deported on the so-called Bolshevik
Arc to the Soviet Union.

Parson’s
turned her attention to defense work.By
1924 she had drifted from the IWW because its General Defense Committee would not extend it support to Communists.She also began to believe that the classic
anarchism that she had long advanced had failed to ignite revolution but that
the Soviet experience showed a new way.It was not an overnight thing.

In
1925 she began working with the National
Committee of the International Labor Defense which was backed by the
Communists and worked on behalf of unjustly accused African Americans such as the Scottsboro
Boys and Angelo Herndon.

During
yet another Depression the now 80 year old returned to agitating for the
unemployed and advocated the formation of unemployed
unions.She spoke regularly at
Chicago’s Bughouse Square free
speech forums where a kid named Studs
Terkle listened with rapt attention to her still fiery speeches.The Chicago Police still wasted no opportunity
to harass her and friends had to always be ready to bail her out on petty
charges.

Despite
the estrangement from the official IWW and her increasing closeness to the
Communists, she remained attached to the social circle around the IWW
headquarters and local branch.She
attended social and picnics, attended educational meetings although she was not
longer invited to speak.Young IWW
editor and organizer Fred W. Thompson, who
also was a Socialist Party member, got to know her and admire her in spite of
their political difference.Fred, who
was my personal friend and mentor in
the IWW, spoke of her fondly and much later helped Carolyn Ashbaugh research her ground breaking biography, Lucy
Parsons: American Revolutionary and shepherded it to print by the old
Socialist publisher Charles H. Kerr
& Co.

Although
records have never been found, some historians believe that Parson’s finally
officially joined the Communist Party in 1939 after years of resisting putting
herself under rigorous party discipline.Others are not so sure.When she died the Daily Worker’s extensive
and laudatory obituary failed to
claim her as a member.

Her
death was particularly tragic and horrifying.She burned to death along with her mentally disable adult son in a fire
at her house in the Avondale
neighborhood of Chicago’s north side on March 7, 1942 at the resumed age of
89.She was by then nearly blind.

In
a final indignity, here irreplaceable library of over 1,500 volumes of labor
and anarchist books along with all of her personal paper and memorabilia of her
long career which had survived the fire with only minor damage, was seized by
Chicago police and immediately destroyed.

Lucy
was laid to rest near her husband and the Haymarket Martyrs monument.A few feet away the ashes of Emma Goldman
rest beneath another stone and she is surrounded by generations of unionists
and radicals.Others like Joe Hill have had all or part of their
ashes scattered there.

The
site of the house she died in now lies beneath the Kennedy Expressway.Almost
as if the city were still trying to expunge her from memory.